Population dynamics is the branch of life sciences that studies the size and age

composition of populations as dynamical systems, and the biological and

environmental processes driving them (such as birth and death rates, and by
immigration and emigration). Example scenarios are ageing populations,
population growth, or population decline.

Population dynamics has traditionally been the dominant branch of mathematical

biology, which has a history of more than 210 years, although more recently the
scope of mathematical biology has greatly expanded. The first principle of
population dynamics is widely regarded as the exponential law of Malthus, as
modeled by the Malthusian growth model. The early period was dominated by
demographic studies such as the work of Benjamin Gompertz and Pierre
François Verhulst in the early 19th century, who refined and adjusted the
Malthusian demographic model.
A more general model formulation was proposed by F.J. Richards in 1959, further
expanded by Simon Hopkins, in which the models of Gompertz, Verhulst and also
Ludwig von Bertalanffy are covered as special cases of the general formulation.
The Lotka–Volterra predator-prey equations are another famous example, as well
as the alternative Arditi–Ginzburg equations. The computer game SimCity and
the MMORPG Ultima Online, among others, tried to simulate some of these
population dynamics.
In the past 30 years, population dynamics has been complemented by
evolutionary game theory, developed first by John Maynard Smith. Under these
dynamics, evolutionary biology concepts may take a deterministic mathematical
form. Population dynamics overlap with another active area of research in
mathematical biology: mathematical epidemiology, the study of infectious disease
affecting populations. Various models of viral spread have been proposed and
analyzed, and provide important results that may be applied to health policy
decisions.
The rate at which a population increases in size if there are no density-
dependent forces regulating the population is known as the intrinsic rate of
1 dN dN
increase. It is =r , where the derivative is the rate of increase of
N dt dt
the population, N is the population size, and r is the intrinsic rate of increase.
Thus r is the maximum theoretical rate of increase of a population per individual
– that is, the maximum population growth rate. The concept is commonly used in
insect population biology to determine how environmental factors affect the rate
at which pest populations increase. See also exponential population growth and
logistic population growth.